Published 4:00 am, Monday, February 14, 2005

The San Francisco Unified School District will have to close two or three schools in June due to declining enrollment, according to Board of Education President Eric Mar.

Mar said Superintendent Arlene Ackerman has alerted him that De Avila Elementary in the Haight, Golden Gate Elementary in the Western Addition and Luther Burbank Middle School in the Excelsior could all be on the hit list because they are so under-enrolled, though he hastened to add none of the choices have been made final.

The district will take the first step toward closing schools when the school board holds a special meeting Tuesday to discuss the matter.

"The most horrible thing to do as a school board member is to consider closing a school and a whole community down," Mar said. "It really hurts to even have to think about closing schools."

It's hardly a situation unique to San Francisco, with districts around the region forced to close schools because they're losing so many students. Oakland Unified will close seven schools at the end of this year. San Jose Unified will close three on top of the three it closed last year. West Contra Costa and Benicia will each close one. San Juan Unified, which serves the Sacramento area, will vote later this month on whether to close two schools.

In San Francisco, Ackerman has been warning of school closures since last year due to continued sliding enrollment.

Now, 57,144 students are enrolled in the district, down about 700 from last year and more than 3,500 from five years ago. The district is projected to lose another 4,000 students in the next five years.

With the state giving the district $4,878 annually for each student it enrolls, the financial repercussions are huge. If per-student funding rates remain the same, the district will receive close to $20 million less from the state in five years than it does now.

The district reached its peak of 93,000 in the late 1960s, but enrollment has been on the downturn ever since due in part to steep housing prices forcing families out of the city. In addition, many families leave the city or enroll their children in private schools out of dissatisfaction with the schools their children are assigned to under the district's court-monitored desegregation plan.

Another blow to the district financially has been the increase in charter school enrollment. This year, 1,782 students are enrolled in charter schools, a figure that is projected to climb to 2,262 students for the 2005-06 school year, according to Myong Leigh, the district's chief of policy and planning.

Under a burdensome legal arrangement, the district receives the same $4, 878 from the state for each charter school student, but must pay the managers of charter high schools $5,650 for each student. That means the district loses almost $800 annually for each student who enrolls in a charter high school.

"That's just part of the state's current system," Leigh said. "They didn't want there to be an incentive for districts to convert their schools to charter schools to make money, but this goes way in the other direction. It's a tremendous penalty."

It all adds up to a bleak financial situation that makes shutting schools necessary, Leigh said. After all, no matter how few students are enrolled in a particular school, the district must pay for its principal, clerical staff, custodial staff, security and utilities.

"It's a question of efficiency after a while," he said. "Whether it's now or later, unless the demographic projections are fundamentally wrong, this is a discussion that the board needs to have."

Some communities have been buzzing with talk about potential school closures.

The Haight-Ashbury Neighborhood Council made a symbolic vote at its meeting last week to recommend that all three schools in the area stay open. It also hosted the principals of each school who talked to families about the benefits of finding a public school close to home that they are happy with.

Gregg Leadley, a language arts teacher at Burbank, said talk around the water cooler has focused on speculation about which schools will close.

"It's on a lot of teachers' minds," he said. "It's declining enrollment across the board, so I can see how things need to be figured out ... (but) people are attached to it and would like to stay."

The decisions are made more urgent because letters are due to be mailed out March 11 telling families which schools their children are assigned to for the fall. If schools do wind up closing, it could throw off the assignment system.

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Mar said he thinks the district is taking up the matter too late in the school year.

"There's an urgency to make decisions and to bring the affected communities together," Mar said. "I do feel like we're moving too slowly, and we're already behind."

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